Woman Indicted In MySpace Suicide Case

longacre writes "The Associated Press is reporting an indictment has been handed down in the sad case of Megan Meier, the girl who committed suicide after receiving upsetting MySpace messages from someone she perceived to be her boyfriend. It was later determined the boy, Josh Evans, was a fictitious identity created by a neighbor of Meier's family. Lori Drew, of a St. Louis suburb, has been charged with 'one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.' Interestingly, despite the alleged crime having occurred strictly in Missouri, the case was investigated by the FBI's St. Louis and Los Angeles field offices, and the trial will be held in Los Angeles, home of MySpace's servers. Wired is running a related story about the potentially 'scary' precedent this case could set."

Comments

Re:Back To Reality

[sheldon]

Then again the woman in question _CANNOT_ be allowed to get away with what she's done.

Which is why prosecutors use a related law applicable to something she did in the commission of the original sin. Al Capone was brought down on tax evasion charges, because they couldn't get anything else to stick. In this case they'll get her for abuse of computing facilities or mail fraud or something stupid.

Just to make the point.

And frankly, this woman deserves a bit of time in jail doing hard labor. I could have understood it if a teenager did this alone, but the fact that the mother got involved shows extreme lack of judgement. A mother is supposed to say to their child "let it go", not egg the whole thing on further.

Re:It's as simple as this

[spazdor]

Aw, c'mon. Troll?

My point was serious: The outside world contains people who are mean. Whether they come from real actual asshole teenagers or asshole adults pretending to be teenagers, any responsible parent or netadmin should take it as inevitable that spoofed packets and mean messages are going to arrive.

If you're going to go running an exploitable service such as a teenage girl's heart on an open connection, then you should make damn sure her inputs have been sanitized, and that malformed data isn't going to crash her.

At the very least you should source-verify anything coming from an untrusted host.